10

Do you know of a guide that walks you through the choosing of a licence?

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closed as off-topic by Stephen Kitt, ArtOfCode♦ Jun 15 '16 at 19:40

This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:

  • "Questions that ask for off-site resources, or for a recommendation of an open source service or product are off-topic because they don't directly concern an issue related to open source development. See: What's wrong with external resources questions? for more information." – Stephen Kitt, ArtOfCode
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  • 1
    Question reformulated to hopefully be more on topic. – James P. Jun 16 '16 at 0:16
  • I do not think this is off topic. Even if this is about external resource, no single answer could reasonably provide a comprehensive answer. – Philippe Ombredanne Jun 16 '16 at 10:05
  • @PhilippeOmbredanne do you mean it is not algorithmically possible to determine what licence a person should use with respect to their needs? – James P. Jun 29 '16 at 7:01
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That would be GitHub's Choose a License tool.

This wizard will let you choose what you're most concerned about - be it giving maximum freedom to your users, preventing patent claims, or ensuring that downstream developers can't remove user freedoms (i.e. copyleft).

As of this writing, there's 7 main licenses which this tool will help you compare. There's also non-software options that it links to.

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  • It would be helpful if you could expand on the benefits of this tool, even if it's just a sentence or two. – Zizouz212♦ Jun 14 '16 at 23:33
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    @Zizouz212 Point taken, and done :) – Tim Malone Jun 14 '16 at 23:37
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    That's better than what I was hoping for! Take a +1 :) – Zizouz212♦ Jun 14 '16 at 23:39
5

I found a few charts on a Programmers Stack Exchange post:

Chart one

and this...

Chart two

The GitHub and Creative Commons licence choosers have their downsides. The CC chooser looks at non-software licences. The GitHub licence chooser isn't necessarily interactive - and only included a bunch of pre-selected "featured" licences.

There is also this interactive licence chooser developed by OSS Watch, published by the University of Oxford.

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  • @Zizou212 that's a decent basis. Much appreciated :) – James P. Jun 29 '16 at 7:02
0

There is only one serious free libre and open source license wizard picker to pick a license and this is the work of Dan Bentley and Brian Fitzpatrick : Which open source license?

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    It's bothering me that you can't get to Lucent. – Tim Malone Jun 15 '16 at 12:42
  • @TimMalone :D this is the plan9 island ;) – Philippe Ombredanne Jun 16 '16 at 10:02
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    I am not sure the downvoters have any sense of humour.. sad. – Philippe Ombredanne Jun 16 '16 at 10:03
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    Upvoted for the humour :) – James P. Jun 29 '16 at 7:01

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